The MVP Machine

by Ben Lindbergh

  5

  A BOTTOM-UP REVOLUTION

  Congratulate yourself if you have done something strange and extravagant, and broken the monotony of a decorous age. It was a high counsel that I once heard given to a young person, “Always do what you are afraid to do.”

  —RALPH WALDO EMERSON, “Heroism”

  April 16, 2018, was an off day in Los Angeles for the Red Sox. But for Red Sox outfielder Mookie Betts, there would be no rest.

  Boston hitting coach Tim Hyers suggested to Betts that he spend the day working with the silver-haired, blue-eyed Doug Latta, a self-described swing whisperer. On that Monday morning, Latta drove to the team hotel and picked up Betts, who brought with him a couple of his personalized Axe Bats, which feature handles shaped like that of a hatchet. They drove to a facility Latta occasionally used that was closer to Anaheim than his own Los Angeles headquarters: the covered batting cages at Anteater Ballpark, home of the UC Irvine college baseball team, whose coach was a friend.

  The twenty-five-year-old Betts was coming off an excellent 2017 season, albeit a disappointing one for him. His .803 OPS (on-base plus slugging) was slightly above average but down significantly from his .897 mark the previous season, although his elite base-running ability and defense in right field had made him a five-win player regardless. Many athletes are afraid to change. Betts wasn’t, even if that meant listening to the advice of an outside instructor like Latta, whose own playing career never advanced past junior college. Already a two-time All-Star, Betts wanted to be better.

  Many of the hitters who had previously sought change were desperate, seeking to extend careers. But what if a top-shelf talent like Betts—renowned for his elite hand-eye coordination and athleticism and already experimenting with a nontraditional bat handle designed to enhance bat speed and control—adopted a better swing? What if stars started rethinking their potential and making large leaps?

  Hyers joined the Red Sox after the 2017 season, following a two-year stint as the assistant hitting coach for the Dodgers. A Georgia native with a trace of a southern accent, Hyers had a brief big-league career, batting .217 with two homers in 133 career games for the Padres, Marlins, and Tigers. He had been taught to swing down on the ball. He didn’t think he could be a power hitter. He thought his skill level was fixed.

  Hyers sought out Latta late in the spring of 2016, after speaking with Justin Turner about the swing he learned from Latta. They met for breakfast one morning in the suburb of Silver Lake. The meeting lasted four hours.

  Up to that point, few professional coaches had accepted Latta into their circles of trust. He was perceived as an unwelcome outsider who meddled with other coaches’ players. But as Boston’s charter arrived in Los Angeles on that early season road trip, Hyers wanted “another set of eyes”—Latta’s eyes—on a swing Betts had begun to forge that spring. Latta was a master at understanding how every part of the body worked in concert.

  As Latta drove Betts to the UC Irvine baseball facility, he asked him if he was sure he wanted to exert himself. Betts had been out of the lineup Sunday after injuring his left foot in a collision at home plate the day before. He said he was fine, and X-rays were negative. So they went to work as Latta does with almost every hitter. “We want the hand path to work and get length,” said Latta of creating an upswing with extension, “to get the body balanced and move forward.”

  They worked together in private for several hours in open-air cages covered by hunter-green corrugated metal. The next day, Betts returned to the lineup against the Angels’ rookie sensation Shohei Ohtani. Betts batted first, where he had taken the vast majority of his at-bats as a big leaguer. At five foot nine, 180 pounds, he had the body of a leadoff hitter in addition to elite hand-eye ability. He had shown surprising power. That threat was about to become even more significant.

  In the Anaheim twilight, Ohtani threw a full-count fastball that came close to the plate, knee-high. A keen observer could have noticed that Betts’s swing—already much changed that spring under Hyers’s instruction—looked different. As Ohtani delivered, Betts lifted his left leg and began his stride toward the pitcher. His hands dropped lower toward his belt. As he moved forward, his hands stayed back and “under” the ball, as Latta teaches, which would enable his bat to travel on an uppercut trajectory. Pitches travel at downward angles, both because they’re released from an elevated mound and because gravity acts upon them. A flat bat path is on plane with a pitch for a very short period of time. An upward path increases the odds of optimum contact.

  In a blur, the barrel connected with the Ohtani pitch and drove it high into the violet sky, the silhouette of the San Gabriel Mountains still visible in the distance. Rather than wrapping around his back as it often did, Betts’s follow-through traveled on a path that finished high and slightly above his shoulders. It was almost like a golfer’s swing—or like Turner’s.

  The ball traveled 411 feet, landing beyond the left-center-field fence and ricocheting off the faux boulders and back onto the field. Betts ran around the bases, businesslike. No smile cracked his countenance.

  When Betts came up in the third inning, Luke Bard had replaced Ohtani. Bard’s second pitch to Betts was a hanging slider. Betts again dropped his hands lower. His bat got on plane with the pitch earlier, and he drove slightly under and through the ball with lightning-quick hands. He again finished higher in his follow-through. Betts launched the ball beyond the bullpens in left-center field, 417 feet away from home plate. He lowered his head and subtly flipped his bat.

  In the eighth inning, Betts faced Cam Bedrosian. As the temperature dropped throughout the evening, Betts blew on his hands prior to grasping his Axe Bat and stepping back into the right-handed batter’s box. Bedrosian’s first pitch was an inside fastball. Betts swung, making contact well out in front of the plate, where most home-run contact happens. The ball soared toward center field. This time Betts watched it briefly, and a small grin appeared. The ball landed on an AstroTurf knoll beyond the playing surface, 427 feet away: his third home run of the game. And on May 2, Betts would author another three-homer game.

  Betts was following the trail blazed before him by a select group of hitters, including one Latta had helped transform from a castoff into a star.

  On September 6, 2013, Turner, then a New York Mets utility infielder, borrowed the bat of teammate Lucas Duda and walked into the on-field batting cage at Progressive Field in downtown Cleveland. It was the beginning of one of the most unthinkable transformations in modern baseball history.

  Turner’s former Mets teammate, Marlon Byrd, had been traded a week earlier to the Pirates. Turner and Byrd had spoken often about hitting. The public was suspicious about Byrd’s 2013 breakout because Byrd had been suspended for fifty games in 2012 after testing positive for a banned substance that masks steroid use. (Byrd would retire in 2016 after testing positive for a banned substance again.) But Turner—and another light-hitting Mets infielder named Daniel Murphy—listened to Byrd in 2013 because Byrd had changed his approach to hitting in a way that had nothing to do with drugs.

  Byrd was six feet tall with a 245-pound frame, and yet prior to 2013, he had been a ground-ball hitter. “I came from more of an old-school style of baseball,” Byrd told Travis in 2013. “Coming up, the coaches I had played for in the 1970s and 1980s, they were taught to swing down.”

  Byrd’s breakout 2013 season, which featured career-bests in home runs (twenty-two) and slugging percentage (.526), came at an age, thirty-six, when players are typically in decline. His preceding suspension made the stats look like a chemical mirage, but in a single off-season, Byrd had changed the nature of how he swung and the angle at which his bat struck the ball.

  Byrd and Turner conversed during batting practice, during games, and on late-night charter flights as they crisscrossed the country to fulfill the demands of the major-league schedule. Turner was intrigued by Byrd’s radical new theories of hitting. Byrd spoke about how Latta had helped him adopt a leg kick and
more loft in his swing the previous winter. As a result, he was more direct in his movement to the pitch. Turner knew Byrd had decreased his ground-ball rate from 49.6 percent in 2012 (which was near his career rate) to 39.2 percent in 2013, while raising his fly-ball rate by 12.2 percentage points, the third-greatest increase in baseball. Professional batters take tens of thousands of swings between when they first pick up a bat and when they make it to pro ball, hardwiring a swing path into their muscle memory. Most coaches thought that trait couldn’t be changed. Byrd challenged that notion, suggesting that hitters could evolve, and relatively quickly, even at advanced ages.

  Byrd embraced a style completely different from what Mets hitting instructor Dave Hudgens advocated. (Hudgens would later adjust his beliefs when he became the Astros’ hitting coach.) Early that spring, Byrd launched ball after ball out of a spring training backfield at the club’s Port St. Lucie complex. The Mets’ staff told him his new swing wouldn’t work in games. He was sure they were wrong. Hitters were taught that home runs were blissful accidents and that they ought to try for low line drives. Byrd believed in trying to hit home runs in games and in practice. He was done with conventional wisdom.

  Turner had not homered in his 183 plate appearances in 2013, and he started September 6 with a .639 OPS, well below the league average. He was a bench player known for his glove, shock of red hair, and amber beard. But on this midafternoon in Cleveland prior to a 7:05 p.m. game, Turner tried on a new identity.

  Duda’s bat was an inch longer and an ounce heavier than his own model—thirty-four inches, thirty-three ounces—which is why Turner chose it. Maybe it would help him generate more power. As he entered the on-field batting cage to begin his experiment, he thought about what Byrd had preached: “Take a large stride. Gain ground.” In other words, move toward the pitcher, creating a more linear path that would transfer energy more efficiently. Byrd also harped on contact point, explaining that batters should think about catching the pitch out in front of the plate, whereas most traditional teaching held that batters should let the ball travel longer and deeper, closer to the plate. Catching the ball out front would better organize the body and allow for the ball to be pulled into the air: the most valuable batted-ball type in baseball. In 2018, MLB batters hit .565 with a 1.267 slugging mark on pull-side air balls, and 32.7 percent of such batted balls went for home runs.

  All his life, Turner had been told to let the ball travel as deep as possible and to try to hit low line drives. Now, Turner, who would turn twenty-nine in November, was ready to experiment. He knew the Mets might not tender him a contract after the season. If he wanted to play more, or at all, he had to change. He had to hit.

  Turner had studied kinesiology at Cal State Fullerton, where he hit seven home runs in 1,008 at-bats. While Byrd’s theories made sense, Turner didn’t think he could become a home-run hitter. He had hit just six home runs over parts of five major-league seasons. But unlike Betts, he had little to lose. He traded in a fixed mindset for a growth one.

  “I was thinking, I’m just going to try and catch the ball as far out as I can in batting practice,” Turner says.

  Only a few saw the beginning. They saw Turner connect with pitches that began to fly over the nineteen-foot, left-field wall. The clank of balls against empty bleachers resonated throughout the mostly empty ballpark. It was a sound Turner was not accustomed to creating. Teammates raised eyebrows.

  “I didn’t even feel like I was swinging hard,” Turner says. “I was like, this is amazing.”

  In his first two at-bats on September 6, Turner grounded out twice versus Scott Kazmir. But in the top of the seventh, he faced right-handed reliever Cody Allen. A paltry crowd of 15,962 watched as Turner caught an elevated fastball well out in front of the plate.

  The feeling of hitting a home run was alien to Turner. He ran out of the box. His attention was fixed on Cleveland center fielder Michael Bourn, who raced backward. “Get over his head! Get over his head!” Turner exclaimed in his head, his heart hammering as he approached first base, the ball he had struck still hanging in the air. Turner was as astonished as anyone when the ball vanished into a row of trees beyond the center-field fence.

  “I was like, oh my God, what just happened?” Turner says. “I didn’t hit enough home runs to know what it was like when I got it.”

  Turner floated around the bases, trying to keep his composure, trying to be emotionless, acting as if he had been there before. Except that he hadn’t been there before. His teammates were slack jawed. “Swaggy,” as Turner was nicknamed, did that? Following the game, Turner met his then girlfriend, now wife, at the Jack Casino in downtown Cleveland. Under the lights, above the din of the casino, Turner couldn’t stop talking about what he felt and what he might have found.

  Two days later, the Mets and Turner faced the Indians and hard-throwing rookie Danny Salazar on a sunny Sunday afternoon. During his second at-bat, with the count three balls and one strike, Salazar challenged Turner with an elevated 96 mph fastball. Turner caught the pitch out in front of the plate. The ball soared on a majestic trajectory, landing halfway up the sun-soaked, left-center-field bleachers. It was as if Roy Hobbs had stolen Turner’s jersey and hit right-handed. For the eighth time in his career—and the second time in three days—Turner circled the bases.

  Turner played in ten games with the new swing that September. In that limited sample, he batted .387 and slugged .677. He knew he needed to visit Doug Latta.

  Amid the urban sprawl of Northridge, California, close to a Costco, a mobile-home park, and an In-N-Out Burger, is a long, narrow business park that terminates near a set of railroad tracks. In one of the business park’s long, narrow units, Latta transforms hitters.

  Inside Latta’s facility, the Ball Yard, are two batting cages, a couple of couches, a half bathroom, and a kitchenette. Everything one needs to hit for hours. Outside the main batting cage is a large television whose screen Latta has covered with a clear sheet of plastic so he can pause video and use marker to scribble over the image, identifying flaws—his homemade telestrator. It is a modest, white-drywalled space with a green AstroTurf floor, but as Latta tells hitters who might be expecting a more lavish facility when they first walk in, “We don’t need much space to get better.” The same goes for any hotbed of talent development: all that’s required are ideas, information, passion, and reps. Lots and lots of reps. The Ball Yard was where, in the winter of 2013–2014, Latta helped Turner morph from a journeyman into a something more.

  At the Ball Yard in 2018, Latta scrolls through his video library, finds some early footage of Turner, and plays it on the flat-screen television outside the batting cage. It’s from January 27, 2014. Turner was unemployed then. He’d been nontendered by the Mets. On the video, Turner has a shorter beard and wears a T-shirt, shorts, and a hat turned backward. He takes a swing. He goes into his leg kick and takes an exaggerated stride.

  “This is before he narrowed up,” Latta says of Turner’s stance. “Those days we were just pumping.”

  By “pumping,” Latta means taking a lot of swings. Latta pulls up another video of Turner from April 24, 2014, after Turner had signed a minor-league deal with the Dodgers with an invite to spring training and ended up making the team as a replacement for the recently retired Michael Young. Turner was still a part-time player. In the clip, his hands are higher than they were in January. So is his leg kick. He looks off-balance several times, finishing with his feet out of the would-be batter’s box as he gathers himself. As he swings, he rocks his weight on his back leg, which is a no-no for Latta.

  “People forget that’s how J.T. looked then,” Latta says. “He’s gotten narrower, the leg kicks up more. It got easier and easier and easier.”

  Latta and Turner weren’t alone. Byrd was often there also, hitting and serving as something of a quasi-assistant coach.

  “It was hard. It was tough. I had twenty-five years of habits to break,” Turner says. “Marlon had talked about it all year long,
so I kind of had a head start going in there, knowing what [Latta] was talking about.”

  Over that winter, Turner trained at the Ball Yard for three months, four days a week. He and Latta worked for three hours per session, taking seven or eight rounds of batting practice per hour, fifteen to twenty pitches per round. He estimates that he took twenty thousand swings.

  Latta has documented Turner’s entire evolution. Since that winter, most of their interaction has come through texting, though Turner sometimes stops by the Ball Yard for a tune-up. Latta interacts with clients he has less familiarity with through FaceTime. He watches most of Turner’s at-bats live. At first, Latta sent constant reinforcements. If he saw footage of Babe Ruth’s swing on MLB Network or elsewhere, he’d capture it and send it to Turner. Ruth had a narrow stance with an exaggerated stride. He contacted the ball out front. His back foot left contact with the ground. Turner laughed about the Ruth video during spring training 2018.

  “‘Look at Babe, he’s really staying back and catching the ball deep,’” Turner said, recounting the text from Latta that accompanied the video. Ruth did the exact opposite of the conventional teaching Latta and Turner were mocking, complete with an uppercut swing.

  “You look at Ruth, Mantle, all these hitters back in the day, they all leg kick or toe tap. They all gain a ton of ground. Their strides are huge.… It’s the theory that whatever starts in motion, stays in motion.… Isaac Newton is my favorite hitting coach. The whole old-school mentality of swinging down, chopping down on the ball? It’s bullshit.”

  Turner slammed the table with a fist in frustration. How many coaches had let down how many players?